On January 12, Meta will permanently remove the 7-day view and 28-day view attribution windows from its Ads Insights API, a change it published on its developer blog back in October 2025. It lands the same week that Google is negotiating its way out of a €2.95 billion EU antitrust fine, customer data platforms keep disappearing into bigger suites through acquisition, and three more states turn on comprehensive privacy law. None of these is a standalone story. Together they describe a marketing stack where measurement, targeting and data ownership are all being redrawn by someone other than the marketing team.
Meta strips two attribution windows from its reporting API
Meta confirmed on its developer blog that, starting January 12, the Ads Insights API will support only 1-day view and 7-day click as attribution windows, eliminating the 7-day view and 28-day view options entirely (Meta for Developers, 2025). The change was announced in October 2025, giving advertisers roughly three months of notice, but it affects every account querying the API at once, with no legacy access route.
Any team that credits upper-funnel display or video spend to view-through conversions inside that 8-to-28-day range will lose that data point after January 12, not see it relabeled. Marketing teams running always-on Meta campaigns should pull a baseline report on current attribution settings before the cutover and expect reported conversion volume to look smaller afterward for reasons that have nothing to do with campaign performance. Anyone briefing leadership on Meta ROI this quarter should flag the methodology change up front, before someone else notices the dip and asks why.
Google's ad tech antitrust case moves to remedies, not resolution
On September 5, 2025, the European Commission fined Google €2.95 billion for abusing its dominant position in the market for publisher ad servers and programmatic buying tools, finding that Google systematically favored its own ad exchange, AdX, over rivals (European Commission, 2025). The Commission's initial view was that only a partial divestment of Google's ad tech business would fix the conflict of interest.
Google disagreed. On November 13, 2025, it proposed behavioral changes instead: giving rival publisher ad servers access to real-time AdX bids, removing Unified Pricing Rules that limit publisher pricing flexibility, and agreeing not to rebuild the First Look and Last Look auction features the Commission had objected to, overseen by an independent trustee for three years (Google, 2025). The Commission has not yet said whether it will accept that proposal in place of a structural breakup.
For marketing teams, the practical takeaway is not to assume today's programmatic pricing and inventory access in the EU stays fixed. Whichever way the remedy lands, publisher-side auction mechanics are due to change; teams buying open-web display in Europe should build reporting that does not assume Google's current defaults are permanent.
CDP consolidation trades independents for embedded scale
The customer data platform market kept consolidating through 2025 rather than producing new standalone winners. Salesforce closed its roughly $8 billion acquisition of Informatica on November 18, 2025, to shore up the data foundation behind its agentic AI push (Salesforce, 2025). Rokt acquired mParticle for $300 million in a deal announced in January 2025, and Supermetrics acquired real-time CDP Relay42 in June 2025. The CDP Institute's July 2025 industry update found employment across tracked CDP vendors up 4% to 18,361 in the first half of the year, with delivery- and campaign-focused CDPs now accounting for 71% of all vendors and most of the sector's job growth (CDP Institute, 2025).
The pattern is acquisition of existing CDP capability by larger platforms, not net-new independent vendors. Teams currently running a standalone CDP should ask their vendor directly whether it is being positioned for sale or folded into a parent platform's roadmap, because a change of ownership tends to mean a change in data model, pricing and integration priorities on someone else's timeline.
Three more states turn on comprehensive privacy law
Indiana, Kentucky and Rhode Island's comprehensive consumer privacy laws all took effect January 1, 2026: the Indiana Consumer Data Protection Act, the Kentucky Consumer Data Protection Act, and the Rhode Island Data Transparency and Privacy Protection Act (Koley Jessen, 2025). All three require opt-in consent before processing sensitive personal data, give consumers the right to opt out of targeted advertising and profiling, and require Data Protection Impact Assessments for higher-risk processing. Indiana and Kentucky give businesses a 30-day cure period before enforcement; Rhode Island does not, and can fine violators up to $10,000 per violation from day one.
Separately, Google's Personalized Ads policy update took effect December 12, 2025, expanding Custom Segments availability for Display campaigns to advertisers in previously restricted categories such as health, finance and legal services (Search Engine Land, 2025). That widens the targeting options available to regulated advertisers at the same moment three more states are requiring opt-in consent before that same category of sensitive data gets used for targeting. Marketing and legal teams in regulated verticals should treat the new targeting capability and the new consent requirement as a matched pair, not two separate items on two separate desks.
What to watch next: the European Commission has not ruled on whether Google's November remedy proposal satisfies its September decision, or whether it will still require a partial breakup of Google's ad tech business. That ruling, whenever it lands, will determine how much of the current open-web auction structure survives into the rest of 2026.